Books for Living

  Imagine, too, that whenever you went to a concert you weren’t allowed to view the actual concert but instead had to view it through your device, as though every concert were a solar eclipse and you would go blind if you stared at the thing itself. Only if you were holding your device in front of your face and viewing the event on its small screen would you be allowed to experience heightened moments of artistry and life.

  Such a law would be deemed an insane Orwellian intrusion into our daily freedom, and people would rebel—especially when the law went even further. Imagine that the law decreed that it wasn’t enough to check your machines; you needed to update the world on your activities on not one but several services, posting text, pictures, and links to let everyone know everywhere you went, and everything you ate, and everyone you saw. And when you weren’t posting, the device would be tracking your movements and recording on distant servers where you were, whom you called, and what information you searched for.

  Of course, these laws aren’t necessary. We do this to ourselves.

  So we now have to come up with elaborate ways to stop ourselves from engaging in this behavior. There are the restaurant dinners during which everyone puts their devices into the middle of the table, and the first person to reach for hers or his gets stuck with the bill for the whole crowd. There are programs you can buy that allow you to set a timer that keeps you from checking email or using apps or searching the Web for a certain period of time. One of these, in a truly Orwellian turn of phrase, is called Freedom. The thing that makes you free is the thing that constrains you.

  It’s easy to point to the damage caused by this culture we’ve created but perhaps more important to try to figure out why we are behaving this way.

  Just a few weeks ago, I remember thinking with a slight bit of annoyance about a friendly acquaintance. He posts constantly to Facebook. At times you feel, if you follow him, that you are living his life alongside him. Usually, I enjoy his posts—he’s smart and funny and accomplished, and writes with great style. He also has a lively group of friends, so you can count on his page to have interesting discussions. But this day, I was thinking: Enough. Enough of his friends, his dogs, his opinions.

  Of course, no one was forcing me to read his posts—so I knew my irritation with him was irrational. But I was irritated. And clearly I wasn’t the only person. Someone must have responded critically, because the next post was heartbreaking. It said something along the lines of this: “If you wonder why I post so often, it’s because I’m lonely.”

  We check our smartphones constantly because we are lonely.

  That’s not the only reason, of course. But it’s one.

  We also check them too much because we are addicted to them, because we are impatient and they offer everything in an instant: from something to read to a listing of what’s going on, to information about where to go, to a map to get us there. Checking them causes little bursts of pleasure hormones to fire in our brain—in anticipation of news, or something to laugh at, or something that will happily aggravate us, or the knowledge that our “friends” are “liking” and commenting on what we’ve done and shared.

  We check them because we feel the need. Most people no longer work nine to five. If you work in an office, you are on call twenty-four hours a day, with emails popping up constantly that seem to require action, not to mention ever-newer forms of group communication through which your colleagues are constantly chiming in. And if you don’t work in an office, you still need to be reachable at all times, too—perhaps because you are part of this new economy where we rent our time and talents and cars and homes and services to others in tiny increments.

  We check them because we don’t want to miss out. On anything.

  I am not a Luddite. (As it turns out the Luddites weren’t Luddites either—they weren’t so much against the machinery as they were against losing their jobs, which is perfectly understandable.) I find my little device incredibly seductive. It makes my life easier in myriad ways and also provides a constant source of tunes. I need to remember very little—it’s all there, my backup brain. I’m what a colleague used to call an early adapter, which is an early adopter who is perfectly willing to let the newest gadget show me how to run my life.

  But I’m starting to believe that this is all madness and that we’re already in way over our heads.

  I can’t help but think about my lonely Facebook friend, and I fear that the very thing he is doing to stave off loneliness may be exacerbating it. After each one of those tiny dopamine bursts comes a tiny dopamine hangover, a little bit of melancholy as the brain realizes that the thing we crave—to connect—hasn’t really happened at all. It’s like the feeling you get when you anticipate ordering something you love at a restaurant, and do so, and then are told that they just served the last one, and you will need to order something else. A little lift—they have lemon meringue pie—followed by a little fall: not for you. Our technology gives us the simulacrum of a connection but not the real thing.

  George Orwell correctly predicted much about our world today.

  In 1984, Orwell describes how our hero Winston is surrounded everywhere by Big Brother and his slogans: WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. “He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother.”

  Winston lives in a world of constant surveillance but dares to keep a diary and to think for himself. Both crimes are punishable by death. Some of the monitoring is through telescreens. Orwell writes, “He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them.” Other monitors are the people around you. While sitting in his workplace cafeteria, Winston has “a pang of terror” when he notices a girl with dark hair looking at him. He’s seen her before. “Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about?” He tries to remember if she was already at her table when he arrived and debates whether she’s a member of the Thought Police or an amateur spy.

  Orwell envisioned a world where all truth is what the government decides it is; where two plus two equals five, if that’s the line; where lotteries keep the masses docile as each person waits for her or his chance to become rich. But he did not envision one where we spy endlessly on ourselves. And unlike most of us, Orwell’s protagonist does everything in his power to escape the screens that surround him.

  There’s a portion of 1984 where Winston and the girl he loves do manage to escape the surveillance, or believe they do, and that’s in a room above a secondhand shop in a “prole” part of town.

  I first read 1984 in 1974. I was twelve, and the year 1984 seemed impossibly far in the future, as did the idea of ever being twenty-two years old. The novel fascinated me, even though I had no context for it. To me, it wasn’t about fascism and had nothing to do with the Spanish Civil War or any class politics that I could figure out. It was just super creepy. Telescreens and pneumatic tubes bringing history that needed to be rewritten, thoughtcrimes and newspeak, and a secret Brotherhood plotting the overthrow of a ruling party that controlled everything—this was cool stuff. The only passages I didn’t care for were the “lovey” ones, when Winston and Julia are together in their little room. I skimmed these.

  Rereading the book as an adult, those were the passages that most captivated me. And one sentence in particular: “Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound.”

  How often do I hear silence? Between the buds in my ears when I’m out and the screens that are on when I’m in, the answer is simple: hardly ever. I miss it. It’s hard to remember what it sounds like and all the possibilities it allows.

  Maybe that’s the real tyranny of the smartphones and all the little screens everywhere. They help us rob ourselves of silence.

  Epitaph of a Small Winner

  Overcoming Boredom

  IN SEVERAL O
F its original Portuguese editions, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis carries an evocative subtitle, which can be translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner. In the English translation I first read, this subtitle was adopted as the title. So that’s what I call this remarkable novel, which is dedicated “To the first worm that gnawed my flesh.” Thanks to reading the dedication, I knew right away that our narrator is dead. (Of course, had I read the book in Portuguese or in another English translation, the original title would have told me this; I also would have learned this fact had I first read the Susan Sontag foreword in my edition, as she rightly makes much of it.) The novel is divided into 160 very short chapters. And it begins with a disclaimer, in which our dead narrator lets us know that he doubts the book will be of interest to more than five or ten readers, tops.

  Its author, Machado de Assis, lived and wrote in Brazil in the nineteenth century, was the founder of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, and is one of the country’s most revered writers. He also happened to be a favorite of Lin Yutang.

  Sontag places Epitaph of a Small Winner “in that tradition of narrative buffoonery—the talkative first-person voice attempting to ingratiate itself with readers.” She continues, “Ostensibly, this is the book of a life. Yet, despite the narrator’s gift for social and psychological portraiture, it remains a tour of the inside of someone’s head.” She compares the book to one of Machado’s favorites, Journey Around My Room, “a book by Xavier de Maistre, a French expatriate aristocrat (he lived most of his long life in Russia), who invented the literary micro-journey” when he was under house arrest for dueling. In de Maistre’s highly experimental work, written in 1790, he describes traveling to various locations in his room: his walls, his chaise, his desk. More on that later.

  Machado, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839, was biracial. His father was a housepainter whose parents had been enslaved. His mother, a washerwoman for a rich family, was Portuguese by way of the Azores. Machado’s mother died when he was nine. His father soon remarried, but then died a couple of years later.

  Machado was mostly self-taught and was obsessed with literature from an early age. The translator into English for the edition I read, William L. Grossman, fills in some more details in his introduction to the volume, explaining that even though Machado published a large number of works in all different genres (including plays and poetry) before the age of forty, it wasn’t until Epitaph of a Small Winner came out in 1880 that his reputation blossomed. Grossman adds that Machado worked as a government bureaucrat and that he married an aristocratic Portuguese woman who was five years older, and “who lived with him in what appears to have been complete harmony and devotion.” They didn’t have children. Machado’s wife died in 1904; Machado in 1908, leaving more than a dozen works to be published posthumously.

  Epitaph of a Small Winner is a book that, right from the start, meanders. The narrator halfheartedly apologizes for that: “The reader, like his fellows, doubtless prefers action to reflection, and doubtless he is wholly in the right….However, I must advise him that this book is written leisurely, with the leisureliness of a man no longer troubled by the flight of time; that it is a work supinely philosophical, but of a philosophy wanting in uniformity, now austere, now playful, a thing that neither edifies nor destroys, neither inflames nor chills, and that is at once more than pastime and less than preachment.”

  Our dead narrator is named Bras Cubas. Hence the original title. He’s every bit the maddening egotistical misanthrope that Sontag warned me (well, not just me but anyone who reads her foreword) that he would be. He’s either constantly ill or a hypochondriac or both. He’s pompous. Selfish. And his life is a series of blunders and disappointments and misunderstandings. He’s convinced he’s made a great discovery that will change the world, but nothing ever comes of it.

  This is not a great man. But he’s a modern one.

  The book is filled with oddities. One chapter is nothing but a series of dots. It’s titled “How I Did Not Become a Minister of State.” Another chapter is titled “Unnecessary.” It reads, in its entirety: “And, if I am not greatly mistaken, I have just written an utterly unnecessary chapter.” It’s unclear to me whether he’s referring to the chapter at hand or the one before. I’m not sure it matters.

  An early chapter is set in 1814, at the height of Napoleon’s power. Our narrator’s father hates the dictator; his uncle loves him. When news reaches Rio that Napoleon has fallen (fallen for the first time, our narrator hastens to point out), there is “great excitement” in the house. He writes of himself, then only nine years old:

  During those days, I cut an interesting figure wearing a little sword that my uncle had given me on St. Anthony’s Day, and, frankly, the sword interested me more than Napoleon’s downfall. This superior interest has never left me. I have never given up the thought that our little swords are always greater than Napoleon’s big one. And please note that I heard many a speech when I was alive, I read many a page noisy with big ideas and bigger words, but (I do not know why), beneath all the cheers that they drew from my lips, there would sometimes echo this conceit drawn from my experience:

  “Do not deceive yourself, the only thing you really care about is your little sword.”

  Shortly after reading this passage, I decided to take a break from reading and found myself, as I so often do, checking Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Hipstamatic, and, well, you get the point. And as I looked at all the posts, I was struck by the fact that, really, what everyone on social media was doing was sharing their little swords. And there I was, sharing mine. In a world of big books and big events and big ideas, of course there were some people commenting on these, and of course I was, too, sometimes. But mostly we were all reveling in the minutiae of our daily lives: our little meals, our little pets, our little observations, our little wry asides. As for those of us traveling, we were sharing our little delays and little discomfitures and little peeves: They had the wrong gate marked so I walked past it three times! The boarding was literally [actually, figuratively, as someone else pointed out, while going on to comment that frequent misuse of that word was a major pet peeve] a madhouse!

  But maybe there is nothing wrong with that. Maybe that’s what we’ve always done—on the village green, in the corridors of our apartment buildings, at breakfast with our families as we stood around the kitchen drinking coffee and spreading butter on English muffins. “How did you sleep?” is the first question we ask one another—not, “How did the president sleep?”

  What has grown is our desire to share our little swords with absolute strangers. Sharing them with our friends and families is no longer enough. Increasingly, people want to make their little swords go viral, to get approval from the crowd, to have everyone acknowledge and proclaim that their little swords are as important as Napoleon’s.

  When I post something to social media, why do I do it? I really don’t know. Part of it is the prompt—the various social-sharing programs are very good at encouraging you to add your voice to the chorus. One might ask you, “What’s on your mind?” and so I answer. Another asks you to “Share,” and so I do. Or maybe it lets you know that it’s a friend’s birthday and suggests that you write on her wall. Mostly, though, I’m not prompted: I want to add some encouragement or acknowledge a friend’s joy or pain or simply reaffirm a social bond. Look at my little sword, my friend says. I like your little sword, I reply—meaning, I like you.

  Then there’s the shilling—for myself or for a friend: Visit this store! Buy this thing!

  And then there’s the type of post where someone advertises a contribution—literal or figurative—to a charity or cause. Boasting or helpful?

  Our dead narrator in the Machado novel says of another character, “Naturally, he was not perfect. For example, after making a charitable contribution he always sent out a press release about it—a reprehensible or at least not praiseworthy practice, I agree. But he explained his conduct on the ground that good deeds
, if made public, rouse people to do likewise—an argument to which one cannot deny a certain force.”

  People also like to share wisdom in the form of maxims on their social feeds, just as they always have in every medium.

  Near the end of Epitaph of a Small Winner our dead narrator decides to “set down parenthetically a half dozen maxims.” He describes them as “yawns born of boredom” but thinks “perhaps some aspiring essayist will find use for them as epigraphs.”

  They include:

  One endures with patience the pain in the other fellow’s stomach.

  We kill time; time buries us.

  A coach-man philosopher used to say that the desire to ride in carriages would be greatly diminished if everyone could afford to ride in carriages.

  “Nothing could be more ridiculous than the childish delight that savages take in piercing a lip and adorning it with a piece of wood,” said the jeweler.

  I could share on social media any of these as my own tomorrow, and it would probably be enthusiastically received. As our narrator says, they were born of boredom. And people seeking a moment’s escape from boredom would read them.

  Of course, we know that the narrator is not just dead but fictional. Epitaph of a Small Winner is the work of one of the world’s great writers, a master storyteller, who is treating us to a delightful, inventive, and absorbing novel that is all the more engaging thanks to its eccentric, bored, dyspeptic, infuriating narrator. There’s something magical about this book. People say books made them laugh out loud; this one really did that to me. I underlined passages all the way through it. If this novel is the fruit of boredom, or an ode to it, bring it on.